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Jackie's Journal (7th Excerpt)
(Week 10, GM: Lee, Player: James Beech) March 2016 East Stark, ND Home again. It feels so weird to write those words. There's part of me that thinks it's wrong to call and underground bunker where you've been staying for less than a month "home". But who cares? There's also part of me that thinks it's fun to maul people to death. Those aren't parts of me worth listening to. Elliot and I went back to California. The whole West Coast, the whole country really, is being hammered by storms without end. Internet, cell phone service, and even power are getting sketchier every day. It's one thing to hear these prophecies about the end of the world, but it's another to watch it actually happening. Along they way we met up with some other hunters, also looking to protect innocents from the storms. Two of them I'd never met before: an eccentric necromancer of Viking vintage named Hans and a sort of supernatural scholar called Anna. The last hunter was Luiz. No one else seemed to want to really confront Luiz about the fact that his cult was trying to bring about THE END OF THE FREAKING WORLD, so I decided to do it myself. It turns out that he has defected, although his master's didn't know it yet. I'm not saying that this makes everything suddenly okay, but it did make me feel a lot better. I like Luiz. I'm glad I don't have to count him among the enemy. We had some trouble getting into the state because the whole place was under martial law and Elliot and I are still wanted over that mess with the drought demon. I hindsight, maybe we should have kept it around. California's current problems are all to do with flooding. Anyway, I used some illusion magic to disguise us. It worked but Elliot came out looking about twelve years old. We scraped through somehow and decided our first priority was to get an evacuation started. We found the headquarters of the general who was running things and Anna sent in Mauler, her...guardian? familiar?...this fae cat that hangs around with her to put a psychic whammy on the general so he'd order the evacuation. Then I Saw some misty jaguar spirits closing in on the building. I could See their intent to attack and also See that they were following orders. I sent out my own orders, redirecting them towards an empty building and Rollo helped to cow them into obedience. Meanwhile, Luiz had rigged up some kind of enchanted map to show magical hotspots around the city. The first one turned out to be at a graveyard. One of the mausoleums had an enchanted mirror in it that was churning out more jaguar spirits. When Luiz broke the mirror a huge man with a jaguar's head appeared and started calling up an earthquake. Unfortunately for him, Mauler had already co-opted his mist-jaguars. We hit him with everything we had, and he dropped pretty quickly. Then Hans used some black magic to animate his severed head and we questioned him. It turned out that he was part of a clan of wild fae who ad been corrupted by Tezcatlapoca. They were trying to impress they're new boss by bringing about the apocalypse a few months early. A scrying spell showed us that the wild fae were gathered at one of the other hotspots on Luiz' map and a group of winter fae were gathered at the last. Most of us went to see if we could convince the winter fae to help us stop the wild fae, while Hans stayed behind in the graveyard to raise some undead minions. Elliot, speaking as Lucifer's envoy, secured an alliance with the Winter Lady despite Luiz' help and our combined forces converged on the wild fae's location. There were three of the jaguar-headed creatures perfuming some kind of big ritual and more of the mist-jaguars than I could count. But the scariest thing Elliot. They waded into the enemy with their flaming sword. I had my Sight open to watch the mist-jaguars and with it I could see Elliot's soul. It looked flayed, as if someone had been cutting thin strips out of it, leaving it raw and exposed and out of those cuts flowed a poisonous rage that was swallowing Elliot's mind. Even when the last of the ritualists was torn apart, and the mist-jaguars were under Mauler's control, Elliot couldn't stop hacking at them. Rollo of course thought this was a great idea. He flung himself on Mauler's minions, but Anna stepped into his path, trying to halt him. Rollo seized her and shook her like a rag-doll. I felt his fierce joy, my joy, as her spine broke. She was dead. Rollo killed again. ''I ''killed again. But it wasn't over. Even as I felt the endless screaming well up inside me, I saw Mauler still crouching over Anna's body, his lambent eyes fixed on the Winter Lady. He said something I could not hear, and she nodded. Anna gasped and sat up. Relief washed through me and I sat down hard on the soaked and trampled earth. Anna was all right. It was going to be all right. Except... In my Sight, she looked different. How to explain... Imagine that we're all glasses full of water and when we die, the glasses become empty. When she sat up again Anna wasn't a glass of water. She was a glass of vodka or maybe rubbing alcohol. Still, she's alive and still herself after a fashion. Anything's better than an empty glass. To put it another way, Anna is now the Winter Knight, the mortal emissary of the Unseelie Court. We left Mauler to sort out that particular mess and Elliot and I, both badly shaken, headed back home. Hmm. There's that word again. It still sounds strange, but it feels right somehow. Maybe a home doesn't have to be a place. Maybe you can have a home made up of people. And if there's a part of me that says I shouldn't feel at home with a vengeful crusader and a herald of Hell, I don't care. That's not a part of me worth listening to.